Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  Who Do You Think You Are? was certainly doing very well in Canada. In a talk he gave to Macmillan’s sales people as Who was imminent, Gibson maintained that “every Canadian critic asked to name Canada’s best writers invariably includes Alice Munro on the list.” He concluded that “this is a very, very big book – we’re lucky to have it, and we’re going to see it high on the best-seller list.” The book’s reviews verified this prediction. They were quite positive overall, and sales were brisk; the initial printing of 8,500 copies was exhausted by early January so Macmillan arranged a second one of 2,500. Who was initially announced at $9.95 but, just after Munro’s changes were made and the book was back in production, Macmillan hedged its bet and raised the price to $10.95.

  For her part, Munro embarked on a cross-country tour that took her to Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, and Ottawa by the end of the month. She also visited one or two other smaller Ontario cities. Gibson reported to Close, “Even her shyness about promoting the books seems to be wearing off.” Munro had specifically asked not to do readings or bookstore signings, limiting herself to interviews. Always one to husband her energies, Munro did no more than four a day. Arranging this schedule, she avoided Victoria altogether, although she did break the tour while in British Columbia to visit with Andrea and friends. At her suggestion, this publicity tour emphasized her involvement in the anti-censorship dispute. As Gibson wrote to his colleagues when the publicity for Who was being planned, “In the course of promoting this book, she would be glad to become a spokesman for the anti-censorship forces.” They would, of course, “want to carefully consider the implications of identifying Alice and this book with the cause of anti-censorship.”36

  The first reviews appeared in October. Two of these – in Books in Canada and Quill & Quire – were based on the advance proof of the “Rose and Janet” version of the book. In the former, Wayne Grady noted that, compared to Munro’s earlier work, she “still works the same raw material, but she writes now in a minor, sadder key, and the result is a novel of literary as well as nostalgic value.” After he describes Rose and Janet, he writes that “there is a peculiar two-way mirror effect at the end of the book, a faint Nabokian twist, when a Dalgleish woman asks Janet: ‘That Rose you write about. Is she supposed to be you?’ ” The reviewer in Quill & Quire wished that Munro would “expand her horizons” by taking up different material and moving “on to somewhere else.” The Janet stories “are not, on the whole, as engaging as the Rose collection,” a small confirmation of Munro’s decision to rearrange the book.

  Widely reported, Munro’s changes were mentioned in passing but most reviewers focused on the book itself. William French in the Globe and Mail observes that some of these individual stories, appearing as they did “isolated and out of context” in magazines, “raised doubts about where [Munro] was going, after the great artistic success of her first three books. They seemed to lack the cohesion and vision of her earlier work.” The book, however, makes clear that “there was no need to worry”: “arranged in chronological order,” the stories “come together beautifully, with unexpected unity.” This book “is stamped with the same seal of quality as Munro’s earlier books.” There is, he added, no other “contemporary Canadian writer as good as Munro in conveying the mood and texture of Ontario’s small towns in the three decades to the end of the fifties.” Gina Mallet in the Toronto Star focuses on the payphone windfall in “Providence,” writing that “the lucky strike briefly releases” Rose, who “ ‘wasn’t at the mercy of past or future, or love, or anybody.’ ” In the stories Munro “continually surprises. The drifting nostalgia, the exquisitely turned phrases do not produce a jeweled façade, they are inextricably part of a commentary on a rough, crude, earthy evocation of Ontario. It’s like seeing a perfectly manicured hand with mud under the fingernails.” In the Ottawa Journal Claire Harrison wrote that “these stories are stripped of the romanticism that characterized Munro’s earlier works. They display control and polish along with a gripping sense of immediacy – an outstanding collection by one of Canada’s outstanding writers.” Tim Struthers in the London Free Press saw Who as “much more complex and mature than Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1971), despite a superficial resemblance between the two books.” “Simon’s Luck,” he added, is “possibly Munro’s most overpowering story to date.”37

  There is a sense that the reviewers of Who felt the heft of Munro’s work as a body. Summary comments strove to offer deeper and more literary judgements. In Maclean’s, Mark Abley wrote, “The humor in Alice Munro’s new collection of fiction has a trenchant, bittersweet edge. Good times don’t last long. Love is always tangled up with competing emotions: loneliness, pity, lust. Fun is usually had at the expense of somebody else. Munro is a master of mixed feelings.” Who “is deeper, wiser, more plaintive”; its very title proclaims that “even the fact of identity must be probed, tested, thought over.” In her work “nothing, including the truth, can make us free. The only triumph is the blessing of understanding, a mixed blessing, like them all.” Describing the author herself, Brian Bartlett in the Montreal Gazette saw Who as “further proof of her lavish talent, but it also raises questions about a severity in her vision.” Citing what he calls her “fierce humor,” he points out a description of the student who “attacks Rose” at a party “with obscene insults: ‘He was white and brittle-looking, desperately drunk. He had probably been brought up in a gentle home, where people talked about answering Nature’s call and blessed each other for sneezing.’ The brilliant sharpness of that sarcasm has seldom been seen in Munro.” Linda Leitch, in the University of Guelph Ontarian, offered an encompassing assessment that still holds; she notes “a deliberation and calculation … that is often overlooked in the critical praise of her particular brand of kitchen-sink realism. Beneath the deceptive simplicity of her immensely readable prose lie the marks of a conscientious craftsman; beyond the astonishing precision of detail with which Munro presents the ‘true lies’ of her fiction is a vision and scope that transcends regionalism, feminism and nationalism.” Recalling that Munro won a Governor General’s Award for Dance, Leitch concluded: “I think there’s little doubt that she’ll be receiving another.” Writing in the Newfoundland Evening Telegram, Helen Porter maintained that Munro “is at least as unsparing of her leading character as she is anyone else in the book.” Noting the growth of Munro’s reputation in the United States, Porter asserted that “Alice Munro is one of the best writers of fiction in the world.”

  There were a few dissenters. Some reviewers found West Hanratty to be an unattractive place populated by grotesque characters. Writing in the annual “Letters in Canada” feature of the University of Toronto Quarterly, Sam Solecki placed the book in the context of “feminist fiction of the last two decades” but regretted Munro’s “failure to go much beyond what she had already achieved in that mode in Lives of Girls and Women and in her earlier stories.” He took issue with Munro’s characterization of Rose’s husband, Patrick Blatchford, and related this to a “failure to create fully realized central characters – and her emphasis has always been on character above all other aspects of the story – [which] prevents the book from [being] a worthy successor to Lives of Girls and Women.”

  Reviews of Who are also characterized by comments on specific stylistic matters. Gerald Noonan in the Canadian Book Review Annual takes up Munro’s “most flamboyant phrasing,” what he calls “the excrement vision in winter,” pointing to an image in “Privilege” where the reader finds “framed by the hole of the outdoor toilet; the residual deposits lie glazed with ice, ‘preserved as if under glass, bright as mustard or grimy as charcoal.’ ” Gordon Powers in the Ottawa Revue notes that most of the stories in Who have appeared in U.S. magazines “and a number of Munro’s fans have found this worrisome, as if there is something unseemly about fiction in publications with a larger circulation than Tamarack Review.” Michael Taylor, in The Fiddlehead, uses his review as an occasion to address the
growing, progressive wider appeal such magazine publication implies: “What we have in Alice Munro is a fine, serious writer who attracts readers and publishers from a wide spectrum without her having to do anything drastic either to her style or to her seriousness in the process. She neither writes down for Toronto Life nor up for The New Yorker.” Taylor takes up a key instance, Munro’s use of the phrase “royal beating,” and after quoting it, writes, “This, it seems to me, is Alice Munro writing at her best and most distinctive, seizing upon the buried richness of the literal rendering of a dead metaphor, bringing it to vivid life, modulating beautifully between its incipient imaginative royalty (‘and the blood came leaping out like banners’) and its crassly ordinary immediacy (‘You take that look off your face’).”38

  Here was an author, reviewers and readers were realizing, whose writing would endure for a long, long time. In Saturday Night, Urjo Kareda commented that Munro “has the ability to isolate the one detail that will evoke the rest of the landscape,” and that the collection builds “a rueful understanding of how hard we must struggle, and against what odds, for the little that is actually possible.” This is because “Alice Munro has Chekhov’s eye – and there is no higher praise – for the way in which we ourselves provide the blade which slits the thin, protective partition between what we think we would like to be and what in fact we are capable of being.” In conclusion, Kareda wrote, “Alice Munro’s instinct about the way in which we translate ourselves, the routes of fear or vanity or self-deception by which we allow ourselves to be deflected from the road we long ago mapped out, is what gives her writing its urgency and heartbeat. Her stories are the subtlest summonings to reconsider our lives. Their effect reminded me of Gorky’s description of Chekhov’s presence: ‘Everyone unwittingly felt an inner longing to be simpler, more truthful, to be more himself.’ ” In much the same vein, in the Winnipeg Free Press David Williamson asked whether Munro was “the best Canadian writer.” “It is difficult to say how very good these stories are without becoming repetitious,” he wrote. “Perhaps I had best put it this way: my last reviewing assignment was The Stories of John Cheever. I found that book excellent and said that it confirmed Mr. Cheever’s place as the best American short story writer. Immediately afterward, I have turned to this new group of stories by Alice Munro without feeling any let-down in quality – much of the same shrewd insight and sheer story-telling ability is there. Her stories are just as good as John Cheever’s.”

  When Gibson wrote to Barber telling her he had sent copies of Who Do You Think You Are? to Close and Gottlieb at Knopf, he was already envisioning Munro’s second Governor General’s Award. His hope proved true in March 1979. Margaret Laurence chaired the selection committee. When he wrote congratulating Munro on this award, Robert J. Stuart at Macmillan commented, “You were absolutely right in making the changes you did in your manuscript! Although we had to do some handsprings in order to bring the book out in the fall, the efforts were certainly worth it.” Stuart also noted the reviews Who had received, writing, “Few of our books have been praised so highly.” Who was selected Book of the Year by the Canadian Booksellers Association, and the Book-of-the-Month Club in Canada selected it as well. Having done so, they bought a thousand copies to distribute to their members at the standard – and very deep – discount customary at the time. Learning of this, Barber questioned Macmillan’s action (“Book-of-the-Month Club isn’t any poor relation”) and, while she was not happy about this since it was an exception to Munro’s contract, she went along with the arrangement. This incident illustrates that Barber was looking out for her author’s financial well-being. Because the U.S. book club did not get equivalent discounts, Macmillan was led to rethink these arrangements in the future.

  In mid-February 1979, Barber told Gibson she was pleased to learn that he was considering work by another of her authors, John Metcalf, and asked for reviews of Who (“Knopf wants them; England wants them; I want them”) and more copies of the Canadian edition of the book. “And there’s Alice, about to be swept away by a prize to Australia. She needs time to write. Tell people to leave her alone.” Barber here is characteristically both light-hearted and serious. Who had created a notable fuss around Munro in Canada that was quite evidently growing, something Barber could only delight in; at the same time, she realized that such activities were keeping her writer from the writing time she needed. Munro’s trip to Australia – arranged as part of the Canada-Australia prize she had won the year before – took her away from March 5 to 30, 1979, for a round of meetings, discussions, dinners, and interviews. She was, however, back home in time to accept the Governor General’s Award in Ottawa on April 4 from Governor General Edward Schreyer. During April Robert Laidlaw’s The McGregors: A Novel of an Ontario Pioneer Family, with an introduction by Harry Boyle, was published by Macmillan. Too late, though, for Mary Etta Laidlaw, who died in February. Although there was no author to promote it, Laidlaw’s book was widely reviewed and praised. Munro’s “The Stone in the Field” appeared in the April 1979 issue of Saturday Night; after it did, that story won the McClelland & Stewart Award for Fiction, a National Magazine Award. As 1979 progressed and Alfred A. Knopf prepared to publish its The Beggar Maid that September, and Allen Lane its edition in the United Kingdom the following April, Munro’s writing was reaching out to an ever-widening audience.39

  When Close wrote to Munro explaining her preference for The Beggar Maid title over Who Do You Think You Are? she noted the difference between the two national markets. She wrote that Macmillan’s choice with its recognizable image on the jacket is “a little sassy,” that “it hit just the right note of national pride and recognition. Here we need to establish you as a Canadian, yes, but mainly as a writer of distinction.” Establishing writers in just this way was what Alfred A. Knopf – the publisher who had founded the company in 1915 – was about, the literary trade publishing of well-made books by distinctive writers. He had done as much with numerous writers himself, among them one of Munro’s admitted influences, Willa Cather, and the house still saw this project as its mandate. Not surprisingly, then, The Stories of John Cheever was a Knopf book, and Close sent Munro a copy of it when she sent this letter. Thanking Close and agreeing to The Beggar Maid as her title in the United States, Munro called the Cheever book “the very thing I most wanted.” David Williamson was right to connect Cheever’s book with Munro’s in his Winnipeg Free Press review: writers of distinction, and writers from the New Yorker.

  Part of Knopf’s introductory strategy involved manufacturing and producing its own version of Munro’s text, making a book in keeping with the firm’s historically meticulous methods. Hence, Gibson’s hope that Knopf’s book be the same as Macmillan’s went nowhere. Knopf did, though, cut up a copy of Who to use for typesetting. While such matters lie mainly within the realm of editorial scholarship, such a fact is significant in that, along with the work done on the book by Norton, Knopf’s decision to reset the book allowed Munro a chance to revisit her material one more time. While most of the textual differences between Who and The Beggar Maid are syntactical and stylistic, there are some that go further. “Providence,” for example, has a different ending in each book.

  Knopf had inherited the preliminary work on the cover that Norton had done with the Edward Burne-Jones painting mentioned by Patrick to Rose in “The Beggar Maid” (there the girl was “meek and voluptuous, with her shy white feet. The milky surrender of her, the helplessness and gratitude”). They decided to use it, King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, on the jacket, giving the book a subdued, medieval look, implying a chivalrous romance. One American reviewer confessed to being misled by this cover; seeking “a lurid bodice-ripper or two,” she rummaged through the paper’s rejected review copies looking for “a deliberate retreat from reality.” With The Beggar Maid, though “prepared for blood-and-thunder romance,” she found herself reading “a marvelous book that had been wrongly rejected – victimized by its hopelessly romantic-looking cover.”
A source of differentiation throughout Munro’s career has been the look of Knopf’s books as opposed to Gibson’s; it began with this first shared project and has continued since, though only on that first occasion did Munro’s American publishers opt for a different title.40

  The Beggar Maid was published by Knopf on September 28, 1979, with advance praise from John Gardner, Margaret Laurence, Ross Macdonald, and Joyce Carol Oates. In August, the Kirkus Reviews had pronounced it a “bountifully compassionate and moving book,” noting that some of its stories had been in the New Yorker. Julia O’Faolain, whose novel No Country for Young Men would be competing against The Beggar Maid as finalist for the Booker Prize, wrote an advance review for the New York Times Book Review. She began with the Burne-Jones cover image, writing that Patrick is attracted to Rose as a romantic ideal, that as in the painting he sees in her “qualities she hasn’t got.” She also noted too that Munro’s “humor here is under restraint.… Deft with social detail, she anchors her people firmly to class and place and commands the classic realist’s strengths: moral seriousness, compassion, a sense of the particular.” In this book, Munro offered “the two great, mutually enhancing pleasures of fiction. The first is the sense that a writer has seen through the muddle of experience to an imminent significance and presented us with it: a conviction that things must be thus and not otherwise.” The second is that “an apparently conclusive truth may not be true after all.”